Tag: Andrew Young

HARD FROST AND ANDREW YOUNG

I looked out of the window this morning and thought of Andrew Young.

I looked out of the window this morning and thought of Andrew Young.

I had Young’s poem ‘Hard Frost’ off by heart when I was fifteen. Now only the first line sticks in my head, and that’s the line that came to mind as I surveyed the white roofs of houses and sheds, the powdery neatness of the privet hedges— : ‘Frost called to water, Halt!’

When I learned this poem, I didn’t know Young was still alive. I thought all poets were dead. According to the Wikipedia page I’ve linked to above, he got the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1952, the year before I was born. Since 1952 was the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign (60th anniversary of her coronation next year), he must have been the first poet to get the Queen’s medal. It existed before that – since 1933, in fact – but it was just The Gold Medal in those days, not The Queen’s. Is this interesting? Probably not.

Young was an interesting man, though. He was a Scottish poet-clergyman who started off as a died-in-the-wool Georgian, writing as A J Young. Later he turned himself into ‘Andrew Young’ (1933) when he achieved what he considered his mature style: by this time he was 50. (Ruth Pitter did something a little similar, though she was in her thirties when she abandoned her earlier works).

Young is a nature poet. He wrote an enormous number of poems and I confess I only know a few of them. I love ‘The Stockdoves’, with its magnificent half-rhyming of ‘over’ and ‘lover’ at the end.

Matthias Richter has an interesting website about him and Carcanet has a Selected, which I recommend.

Meanwhile, here is ‘Hard Frost’ (because it is, today, in Scotland, just that, though not such a deep frost or as cold a winter as when Young wrote this.)

…….Frost called to water Halt!
…….And crusted the moist snow with sparkling salt;
…….Brooks, their own bridges, stop,
…….And icicles in long stalactites drop,
…….And tench in water-holes
…....Lurk under gluey glass like fish in bowls.

…….In the hard-rutted lane
…….At every footstep breaks a brittle pane,
…….And tinkling trees ice-bound,
…….Changed into weeping-willows, sweep the ground;
…….Dead boughs take root in ponds
…….And ferns on windows shoot their ghostly fronds.

…….But vainly the fierce frost
…….Interns poor fish, ranks trees in an armed host,
…….Hangs daggers from house-eaves
…….And on the windows ferny ambush weaves;
…….In the long war grown warmer
…….The sun will strike him dead and strip his armour.

 

Frosty morning in Glenrothes

“To whom I was like to give offence. . .”

We ‘did’ Frost for O level.

We ‘did’ Frost for O level.

Ten Twentieth Century Poets, edited with notes by Maurice Wollman, M.A. – I still have a copy, though it’s not the one I used because my name’s not in it. Instead, it’s Susan Heald 5B, Rosemary Green, 4x, Lindsay Brown 4E, Sheila Foster 6”. Where are you now, Susan, Rosemary, Lindsay and Sheila? What do you remember of Robert Frost?

Our teacher was in her early sixties I think, close to retirement. She was plump and very sweet – not a confident woman, but she liked poetry and we must have liked her because we learned not only French vocabulary but also poems on the school bus from Knutsford to Wilmslow, and we passed our exams. I still have ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by heart.

Yesterday, it was ‘Mending Wall’ that came to mind. The fence at the front of the house was being . . . half mended, half rebuilt by two stout members of the family. It fell to me to make scones and bacon rolls to keep them going. Their fingers were literally green by the time they downed tools.

‘Mending Wall’ was the first of the set of Frost poems and therefore the first Frost we read. In my head, Frost got mixed up with Andrew Young, who was in the same book – “Frost called to water ‘Halt! / And crusted the moist snow with sparkling salt”.

And then there was the odd inversion at the start – “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”, instead of “There is something . . .” And that reminded me of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Family, which had been a craze for me and my two friends Kate and Keri the year before. They talked like that in How Green Was My Valley, inverting everything in a Welsh way. In fact, we re-named the novel There is Green My Valley Was, and Kate became Ceinwen, Keri Keridwen and I think I was Olwen. It wasn’t fair to Kate: nobody, after reading the book, wanted to be Ceinwen.

But back to Frost. We used to adapt bits of poems for our own ends. Something would go missing and one of us would say, “it’s not elves exactly”. Or we would be dragged out against our will to play netball in drizzle, moaning “Oh, just another kind of outdoor game”. Even now, when someone fondly produces a well-worn phrase, the words come to me: “he (or she) likes having thought of it so well”.

I didn’t notice how playful the poem was. I didn’t notice “And on a day we meet to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again. / We keep the wall between us as we go.” How regular it is – how the lines of the poem turn into the obedient lines of the wall! And although there are notes at the back of the book, this poem has none.

In the Highlands, there are dry stane dykes all over the place, mossed over and tumbling. Something has often “spilled the upper boulders in the sun” but mostly the lower boulders stay exactly where they are, and the lines of the ancient walls run through wood, valley and field with stoic determination.

But that’s by the by. Our Hatton Green fence is stoutly erected to keep out neighbours’ dogs and make cats think twice.  It’s taller than I might have liked, because my other half wants privacy (“He moves in darkness as it seems to me, /Not of woods only and the shade of trees”). But there’s a little gap underneath. The hedgehog can probably still get in. . . .

SCHOOL KILLS POETRY

I can’t abide Visiting Hour by Norman McCaig. Marking school work has killed that poem for me. Too many nostrils bobbing down too many corridors in too many essays.

I can’t stand Visiting Hour by Norman MacCaig. Marking school work has killed it for me. Too many nostrils bobbing down too many corridors in too many MacCaiging essays.

However, Visiting Hour wasn’t dead when I was at school. It happened later, when I grew up and somehow turned into a teacher. I was appalled by the way schools in Scotland nurtured an obsession with certain texts. They taught the same poems, two or three of them, year in, year out. How could they bear it?

I think it’s because most school teachers don’t actually like poetry. But I don’t think this bizarre obsession with particular texts totally exterminates the Life of Po. Instead, it does something worse. It creates a disproportionate love for a particular piece, to the exclusion of all else. School leavers re-sitting exams in my evening class sometimes protest, ‘But I LOVE Visiting Hour. Please can I just write about it again?’ Arrgggh. I’m a teacher. Get me out of here.

Why do they love it? Perhaps because it’s the only poem they’ve ever studied and survived. The experience doesn’t seem to make them want to read any more poems, not even by Norman MacCaig.

I’ve just fished out the book we used for O level when I was at school in Cheshire forty-three years ago. It’s small and blue and the title is Ten Twentieth-century Poets, edited with notes by Maurice Wollman, first published in 1957. There’s a sticky label at the front: Wilmslow County Grammar School for Girls, and the book was once used, in turn, by Susan Heald (5B), Rosemary Green (4X), Lindsay Brown (4E) and Sheila Foster (6”). At the end of the year we were allowed to buy a copy if we wanted to, and I did.

The book contains poems by Auden, Betjeman, De la Mare, Eliot, Yeats, Andrew Young, Edward Thomas, Edwin Muir, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. We studied five of these – the last five in the list, the ones to whom I’ve given first names. I read some of the rest as well, including ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (a boy I had a crush on told me it was good).

I thought all poets were dead men. I was at an all-girls school studying poetry by all men.

They weren’t all quite dead. Most were: Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Edwin Muir had been gone for ages. Frost was more recently defunct. I would have been astonished to know that Andrew Young was still alive. . . .

We didn’t obsess over one text. We read a clutch of poems by each of our five. We talked about some of them more than others, liked some of them more than others, and learned some of them off by heart, ready for the exams. We learned poems, and French irregular verbs, on the bus. I still have ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ (Frost), by heart, and sections of the other poems – Edward Thomas, for example, in Out in the Dark:

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

I don’t believe we analysed poems to death. Or if we did, I have no memory of it. Only the poems.

I probably do love them more than I should, like Herman’s Hermits and Elvis Presley’s ‘Wooden Heart’. They undoubtedly underpinned my sense of what poetry is, which is why, when I began to write myself, free verse wasn’t my first choice.

I think our class teacher liked poems. I think the girls in my class quite liked poems too. But I don’t know that. Perhaps while I was sitting there liking these words and phrases, they were being slowly asphyxiated for other people in the same classroom. Susan Heald, Rosemary Green, Lindsay Brown, Sheila Foster – where are you? What have you got to say about this?

Special offer: If you’re reading this, and you’re still at school (which doesn’t seem likely, but it’s worth a try), I’ll send you some free poetry (which you may or may not like). It won’t include a copy of Visiting Hour. Just email your address to nell@happenstancepress.com